Midnight in Paris

27 May 2011

Owen Wilson takes the lead in this Woody Allen-less Woody Allen picture. Wilson plays a successful Hollywood writer struggling to write his first novel. He takes his fiancée (played by Rachel McAdams) to Paris, and is toying with the idea of moving there (she wants him to stop romanticizing the past). All we know about his novel is that the central character runs a nostalgia shop, and that Wilson yearns for 1920s Paris. On a late walk back to his hotel, he is invited into a car which takes him back to a party where he meets, among others, Cole Porter, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway. The movie achieves a wonderful story about living in the present, while not dismissing nostalgia entirely. Corey Stoll’s take on Hemingway is alone worth the price of admission.